In addition to anti- and bio-terrorism, topics include hazardous material,
electronic surveillance, cyber-security and more. I clicked on
transportation and was greeted with the option to have an Excel file
downloaded on my machine. Columns on the table include State, Bill,
Sponsor, Summary and Status notations with dates.

Some states start with actions to secure appropriations, while others go
straight for the nitty-gritty. Florida is looking at revising laws
relating to the safety of its highways and seaports. New Jersey,
Massachusetts and others
are focusing on protecting air travelers with such actions as running
criminal checks on employees and permitting aeronautic offices to carry
firearms.

e-Gov FirstStop
e-Gov FirstStop, at
http://www2.ctg.albany.edu/egovfirststop/, provides
information resources needed to begin e-government initiatives. The
University of Albany's Center for Technology in Government sponsors the
resource list which focuses on three subject areas: policy, strategy and
technology aspects. (There are also "General" and "Pending" sections which
deal with general and pending issues as you might have guessed.) Only
resources that are available via the Web at no charge are referenced on
this site.

The Strategy Focus Area addresses the overall approach of an e-gov project
and such strategies as performance goals, implementation frameworks and
leadership. The Policy Area explores the issues an initiative may have on
public policy, like balancing rights and legal questions. And the
Technology area provides information on models and strategies to implement
government online.

This is an interesting resource, not heavily populated, but worthwhile
materials are here. One tip: for a description of the resource, click on
the title. For the resource itself (I saw both direct links and PDF files)
click on the icon to the left of the title.

EDRI
EDRI stands for the European Digital Rights. It's a group of 10
organizations from 7 EU countries focusing on the protecting European
civil rights in today's information and communications age. Their URL is
http://www.edri.org/.

There's not much available here yet. You can learn more about the board
and about the organizations behind the site. Visitors are offered two
subscription options: one to receive news and announcements and one to
join an un-moderated discussion list.

Study Gives Online Campaign Edge to GOP
U.S. Newswire: June 10, 2002. A study by The Bivings Group finds the GOP
challengers for Federal offices are using the Internet more than the
Democratic challengers. The study evaluated Web sites of more than 1000
Congressional
candidates and scored content and visibility on each site.

The study also reported Republican campaign committees were 20% more
likely to have Web appearances, and it was 33% easier to locate the Web
site of a Republican challenger. As for content, the GOP challengers were
more likely to offer contact details, give volunteering information and
accept donations.
http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/first/0610-143.html

(NOTE: Please, no pies from the Dem's who read this. We just reports 'em,
we don't necessarily agrees with 'em.)

Web Conference Debates Records
Management
TechNews.com: May 28, 2002. One of the "hot- button issues" at this year's
National Archives and Records Administration Conference was which parts of
an agency's Web site should be considered federal records. Other issues at
the May meeting of FebWeb 2002 were the Government Paperwork Elimination
Act and security requirements.

According to the deputy director of NARA' s Modern Records Program, both
site and back-end information constitutes official records and are subject
to retention and disposition guidelines. Another panel member felt paper
documents (ie, Federal Register) entries were not public records and a
third panel member stated that all electronic documents on the site she
manages are federal records. Consensus was not reached. Get the full story
at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20930-2002May28.

AltaFresh -- Query Recent Additions to AltaVista
AltaVista's been talking a lot lately about making their search index
fresher and tapping new sources to build their index. I talked to them
some about this last week. While they have very nice date-based searching
on their advanced
search, I wanted more. Why not, I asked, have an interface that allowed
you to choose today or yesterday from a pull- down menu and get a very
small group of search results?

GooFresh -- Query Recent Additions to Google
Meanwhile, Google does not support their daterange: syntax and their
advanced search allows you to search only pages indexed within the past
three months, past six months, or past year. But I'm obsessed with the
daterange: syntax so I wrote a date-based search form for Google too. Try
it out at
http://www.researchbuzz.com/toolbox/goofresh.shtml.

AltaVista Launches New Search Engine
Features
AltaVista (http://www.av.com) has launched
several new tweaks, features, and upgrades to their search engine. And, as
usual, the one they're making the most noise about isn't the one that's
really captured my interest.

But we'll start with that one anyway. The new feature they're talking so
much about is called AltaVista Prisma. It's sorta like clustering
technology and sorta like refining suggestions, but not really either.
Here's how it works: enter a query. AltaVista "AltaVista Prisma instantly
scans through the text of the most relevant Internet search results to
select the 12 most strongly associated words, phrases, names or concepts,
called 'AltaVista Prisma terms'" No more than a dozen are available at a
time.

Pick one, and it's added to your query and another set of Prisma results
is added. You can select from Prisma results twice, and it doesn't matter
how general you are. Thus, whether I do a search for something as general
as cat --
>kitten-->rescues, I still only get two sets of Prismas, just as if I did
something as specific "neural tube"-->Spina Bifida--> fetal surgery. I
think that's a mistake. I think there should be varying levels of Prismas
available.

I think there should also be Prisma "stop words" that don't show up, since
there are only twelve results delivered at a time. Some of the Prismas are
great, very useful, but some of them are not. Take for example the "neural
tube" search. Some of the Prismas, like Anencephaly, are very helpful. But
"Graphic Version"?

So that's AltaVista Prisma. But what am *I* finding interesting with the
new AltaVista? They're finally offering default AND. No OR or AND based on
how many query words you're using and all that stuff. Default query is AND
and
that's it. Thank goodness. Unfortunately case-sensitivity remains a bit
complicated.

Here's the summary on case-sensitivity: items in quotes are case-sensitive
(where there is a case; all lower-case still matches everything.) Items
not in quotes are not case sensitive. So:

Washington -- not case sensitive
"Washington" -- case sensitive

Also new from AltaVista -- an updated index of over 1.1 billion items
(AltaVista does not index other types of files, like PDF files), updated
AltaVista news, a "freshnessinitiative" (more about that tomorrow) and an
AltaVista Webmaster page at
http://www.altavista.com/webmaster.